The Complete Short Stories of L.P. Hartley

by Leslie Poles Hartley

  ‘Well, I don’t know what else you had to find fault with,’ remarked Mrs. Johnstone, ‘except their looks. Ste isn’t a beauty; but you can’t have everything.’

  ‘I am content to have nothing,’ muttered Lavinia. In the fuss of landing, for they had reached the hotel, her rebellious utterance escaped censure. Disencumbered, her mother trod heavily upon the fragile gangway, to disappear amid solicitous servants. She herself remained to collect their traps, hidden by the gathering dusk. Some had slipped off Mrs. Johnstone as she rose, her amplitude, as a watershed for these trifles, making the range of search wide, almost incalculable. She knelt, she groped. ‘I will find them,’ thought Lavinia, and then, as her hand closed upon the last, ‘why should I find them?’ She replaced her mother’s smelling-bottle in a crevice of the cushions, and appealed to Emilio with a gesture of despair. Instantly he was on his knees beside her. The search lasted for a full minute. Then ‘Ecco, ecco,’ cried the gondolier, delighted by his discovery, holding the smelling-bottle as tenderly as if it had been the relic of a saint. Infected by his high spirits, exalted into a mood she did not recognize, Lavinia stretched out her hand for the bottle and smiled into his eyes. Their exquisite mockery, the overtone of their glitter, annihilated time. Lavinia passed beyond thought into a stellar region where all sensations were one. Then the innumerable demands of life swarmed back and settled upon her, dealing their tiny stings. For one thing Emilio must be paid.

  But Emilio had no change. He searched himself, he turned this way and that; he bent forward as though wounded, and backward as though victorious. His hands apologized, his face expressed concern, but not a lira could he find to dilute Lavinia’s fifty. So she gave him the note, and then followed the incident which was eventually to cause her much distress and self-reproach. That she didn’t, at the time, divine its importance the casual entry in her diary shows.

  ‘The depression I have felt the last few weeks left me to-day; why, I cannot think. Perhaps the homily I gave myself last night in bed has borne fruit. I resolved not to be idle, discontented or inattentive, but to throw myself into life and let the current carry me whither it would. Nothing of the sort seems to have happened; I haven’t taken any plunge; but this morning, on the Grand Canal, and still more this afternoon, going round the churches with Mamma (how that bored me at Verona, see August 30th and resolution), I felt extraordinarily happy. (Here the words ‘Perhaps I have a capacity for happiness after all,’ were deleted). Not quite so happy after dinner when we went out to listen to the piccola serenata; that was with a different gondolier. I think I shall persuade Mamma to stick to the one we had this afternoon, engage him by the day. He wanted to come for us this evening, and I have asked myself since (although it is a trivial matter) why I said we shouldn’t need him. I should be sorry if he thought us ungrateful for all his help, but I felt, just at the moment, that I had overpaid him and it would be disagreeable, with the same man, to reduce the rate in future; also I wasn’t sure whether Mamma might not prefer the Piazza, and then he would be disappointed of his fare. I don’t want to appear capricious. Emilio didn’t take my saying no very well, not as pleasantly as he took my fifty lire note; I thought he scowled at me, but it was almost too dark to see. What does it matter? but he had been charming, and it is so seldom a foreigner takes a genuine interest in one. I hope I wasn’t mean over the money; but it makes it hard for poorer people if you give too much, and isn’t really good for the Italians themselves. It would be a pity to spoil Emilio. How lovely the false Carpaccios were—I prefer them to the real ones. Is there anything else? Hiding the smelling-bottle wasn’t the same thing as a lie—just a game, like hunt-the-thimble.’

  4

  Every prospect in Venice gives the beholder a sense of unworthiness and of being born out of time; but Lavinia, arrived early on the terrace next morning, was scarcely at all conscious of inferiority. The sun was brilliant, the water as still as it would ever be. Incompatibilities did not trouble her. The great American cruiser moored at the side of the Bacino, leaning against the land, reassured her by its stability; the Trieste liner, stealthily revolving on itself, contrasted pleasantly with the small fry that looked purposeless and stationary, but were no doubt working hard to get out of the monster’s way. The island of St. Giorgio was evidently the work of a magician; every building fitted into the cliché that guide-books and tourists had agreed upon for it. ‘The Salute itself,’ thought Lavinia, looking her ancient enemy squarely in the face, ‘has a decorative quality, and decoration is something, though of course not the essence of art. Even that ruffianly-looking gondolier is improved by his crimson sash. Now, if Emilio had one—’ And pat to her thought Emilio appeared, cleaving his way towards her and dressed, not in the dingy weeds of yesterday, but in a white suit with a sky-blue scarf that lay like a lake upon his chest, and a sash that poured itself away in a cascade of flounces from the knot at his side.

  Lavinia made up her mind quickly. Espying a high functionary she took her courage in both hands and addressed him. ‘Could she engage Emilio as Mrs. Johnstone’s private gondolier?’

  The man’s manner, a disagreeable blend of insolence and servility, grew oilier and more offensive.

  ‘No, you cannot have him, he is already engaged; the lady and gentleman who went out with him last night have taken him from day to day.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Lavinia, suddenly listless. So this was the meaning of the fine apparel, the meaning of the gondola encrusted with gilt and dripping with fringes? She had been forestalled. Her eyes travelled over the sumptuous vessel and Emilio made her a little salute—the acknowledgment due to a late employer—without much heart in it. She could not go on standing where she was. Despondent she walked back to her chair. The balcony had become a cage, and the day was brilliant, she felt, in spite of her.

  ‘Lavinia!’

  ‘Yes, Mamma.’

  ‘You don’t look as though you had slept any too well. Did you?’ Tenderness and interest alike were absent from Mrs. Johnstone’s enquiry; its tone suggested both certainty and disapproval, and she went on, without waiting for a reply:

  ‘But I’ve got some good news for you, or what ought to be good news. I give you three guesses.’

  Now play up, Lavinia.

  ‘The wordly Elizabeth Templeman is coming here from Rome?’

  ‘Wrong. She is still in bed with the chill she so foolishly caught wandering about the Coliseum after nightfall.’

  ‘The exchange?’

  ‘The exchange is two points worse. Really, Lavinia, you should know these things.’ Mrs. Johnstone could make even guessing dangerous.

  Then it must be that Stephen isn’t—’

  ‘Isn’t! Is, and Monday too. With the Evanses. Now I ought to tell you that Amelia Fielder Evans—’

  ‘My rival?’

  ‘Amelia Fielder Evans,’ said Mrs. Johnstone warningly, ‘is a very determined woman.’

  ‘Yes,’ sighed Lavinia. ‘He certainly should be saved from her.’

  ‘Well, you can save him,’ Mrs. Johnstone observed, ‘and you can do it at dinner on Tuesday. Amelia will be tired from her journey. Now what?’

  ‘Should we bathe?’ suggested Lavinia.

  ‘Heavens! But I thought you wanted to go in a gondola. You are changeable, Lavinia.’

  ‘You have always wanted to see the Lido, Mamma.’

  ‘Very well, then.’

  ‘We’ll walk to the vaporetto. It’s not far.’

  Off they went.

  5

  ‘How brief is human happiness,’ Lavinia wrote that night in her diary. ‘My exaltation of yesterday has almost passed away. I loathed the Lido: all those khaki-coloured bodies lying about, half-interred in sand or sprawling over bridge tables, disgusted me inexpressibly. My Puritan blood stirred within me. Why must they make themselves so common? The people who hired our gondolier came out in the afternoon; they were among the worst, perfectly shameless. Mamma was surprised when I went up to speak to them, but one mu
st be civil to people staying in the same hotel. You never know what you may want from them, as Elizabeth Templeman would say. When they heard who we were, they were impressed and showed it; they come from Pittsburg, their speech bewrayeth them. They offered to take us in their gondola whenever we liked. Mamma was for refusing and reproached me afterwards because I said we would. But are we not all God’s people? We live too much in a groove, and personalities are more interesting than places, as I have proved in many an essay. Still, even as they left my lips, the gracious words of consent surprised me. Strangers are my abhorrence and my instinct was to dislike these, with their name like a Greek toothpaste, Kolynopulo. America is a nation of hyphens and hybrids.

  ‘How discontented all this sounds. I must make a resolution against exclusiveness, a besetting sin. I have always meant to visit the poor, but Venice is not a good place to begin in. . . . How it would surprise Emilio if I turned up at his home, bringing a tract against profanity! The churches are plastered with notices begging the people not to disgrace the glorious language of Dante, Alfieri, Petrarch, etc. I have an idea what his home is like: it would be fun to see if it is a true one!’

  6

  ‘Shame your mother couldn’t come,’ said Mr. Kolynopulo, assisting Lavinia, with more gallantry than was necessary, into his gorgeous gondola. ‘Does she often have headaches?’

  Miss Johnstone wore a harassed air. ‘Venice doesn’t really suit her,’ she replied. ‘It’s the tiresome sirocco.’ She looked wistfully down the lagoon to where that climatic nuisance was wont to assert its presence with an unanswerable visibility; but the air had lost its fever, could not have been clearer. ‘The very heavens give me the lie,’ she thought; and aloud she said, ‘Oh! no, Mr. Kolynopulo, you must let me be selfish and sit here.’ To clinch the argument she sank into the half-way seat. ‘Venice depends so much on where you sit. Here I can see forwards and sideways and even backwards.’ Suiting the action to the word, she gazed earnestly at a point directly in their wake; her scrutiny also included Emilio, who did not return it, but stared angrily at the horizon.

  ‘Good-looking, isn’t he?’ remarked Mrs. Kolynopulo, indicating Emilio with her thumb.

  Lavinia started.

  ‘I suppose he is. I never thought about it,’ she said.

  ‘Then you’re different from most,’ Mrs. Kolynopulo answered. ‘I guess he’s caused a flutter in many a female breast. We considered ourselves lucky to get him. We’ve been the subject of congratulation.’

  ‘Not from me,’ thought Lavinia, eyeing congratulation’s twin subjects with ill-concealed distaste.

  ‘Do you share the flutter?’ she presently enquired.

  Bless you, no,’ replied his wife. ‘We’re married. We leave that sort of thing to the single ones.’

  The slaves of matrimony exchanged affectionate looks and even, to Lavinia’s horror, kissed each other. She wanted to let the subject drop, but instead she asked:

  ‘What sort of thing?’

  ‘What sort of thing which, dear?’ Mrs. Kolynopulo playfully asked her.

  ‘What sort of thing do you . . . . . leave?’ said Lavinia, with an effort making her meaning clear.

  Her temporary hosts looked archly at each other, then laughed long and loud.

  ‘My dear!’ protested Mrs. Kolynopulo, still quivering like a jelly.

  ‘You forget, my pretty,’ her husband reproved her, ‘that Miss Johnstone has been properly brought up.’

  ‘Oh dear, you Boston girls, you ingénues!’ Mrs. Kolynopulo sighed. ‘Ask us another time.’

  But Lavinia had had a revulsion. ‘May my tongue rot if I do,’ she thought, and to change the subject she asked their immediate destination.

  ‘To see the glass made,’ Mr. Kolynopulo replied. ‘Venetian glass, what?’

  ‘Yes, Venetian, of course,’ Lavinia repeated helplessly.

  ‘Well, isn’t it one of the recognized sights? We’ve seen the prison and the pigeons.’

  ‘Oh, perfectly recognized,’ Lavinia almost too heartily agreed. ‘I see the posters and the man with the leaflets.’

  They disembarked.

  7

  On their return they found Mrs. Johnstone seated under an awning, a rug across her knees, a bitter-looking cordial at her elbow. The chair beside her was occupied by a mound of American newspapers, and in front of her another chair supported her work—a box of silks and a vast oval frame within which the features of a sylvan scene had begun to disclose themselves. A pale green fountain rose into the air, whose jet, symmetrically bifurcated, played upon a formal cluster of lambs in one corner and a rose-red rock in the other.

  The Kolynopulos approached as near as the barricade permitted. Mrs. Johnstone did not dismantle it, nor did she rise.

  ‘I’m glad you took Lavinia to the glass-factory,’ she observed, when the conventional expressions of sympathy had exhausted themselves. ‘I could never get her to go. She won’t take any interest in trade processes, though I often ask her where she’d be without them.’

  ‘We should still have each other,’ said Lavinia.

  ‘Of course we should, darling,’ Mrs. Johnstone remarked, greatly pleased. ‘What more do we want?’ The question hung in the air until the retirement of the Kolynopulos, bowing and smiling, seemed to have answered it.

  ‘Oh, Mamma,’ said Lavinia, much concerned. ‘I did not know you were ill.’

  ‘You might have done,’ her mother replied. ‘I told you.’

  ‘Yes,’ conceded Lavinia, ‘but—’

  ‘You are right in a way,’ admitted Mrs. Johnstone. ‘It came on afterwards. Providence would not have me a liar. All the same, I don’t like your new friends, Lavinia.’

  ‘Nor do I, altogether,’ Lavinia confessed.

  ‘Then why let them take you out?’

  ‘Well, we can’t both have headaches, for our own sakes,’ Lavinia obscurely replied.

  ‘It’s not necessary to have them more than once, and mine could have served for both of us, if you’d let it,’ Mrs. Johnstone answered. ‘You don’t understand, Lavinia. Undesirable acquaintances may be kept off in a variety of ways. You saw how I did it just now.’

  ‘But that was very crude, Mamma, you must own, and may have wounded them.’

  ‘If so, I shall have struck oil.’ Mrs. Johnstone paused to appreciate her joke. ‘No; it’s like this. You cannot be too careful. Our station in life is associated with a certain point of view and a certain standard of conduct. Once you get outside it, anything may happen to you. People like that may easily put ideas into your head, and then it’ll be no good coming to me to get them out.’

  ‘Would it be any good going to them?’ In vision Lavinia saw her mind as an aquarium, in which a couple of unattractive minnows, the gift of the Kolynopulos, eluded Mrs. Johnstone’s unpractised hand.

  ‘You’d probably find them more sympathetic,’ her mother replied. ‘But they couldn’t help you, any more than you can help me to get rid of this chill, though you may be said to have given it me, since I caught it bathing with you. But I think you might stay in this afternoon and try.’

  After luncheon Lavinia excused herself from accompanying the Kolynopulos on their visit to the Arsenal.

  In her diary she wrote:

  ‘Poor Mamma, she hasn’t the least notion of what is meant by individualism. She has read Emerson because he was a connection of ours; but she won’t cast her bantling on the rocks, as he advised. The Kolynopulos may be carelessly moulded, they are certainly not roughhewn, and they are well above the surface; indeed, they set out to attract all eyes; it would be a silly ship that went aground on them. How can it make any difference to one’s soul, that inviolable entity, whom one meets? Milton could not praise a fugitive and cloistered virtue. I welcome whatever little trials the Ks. see fit to put mine to. I have summed them up; I know their tricks and their manners; I can look after myself. When their conversation becomes disagreeable, I can always change the subject, as I did this morning. They though
t they were working upon my curiosity, whereas all the time I was leading them on. But, to be quite honest (though why I should say that I don’t know, since this diary is a record of my most intimate thoughts) I wouldn’t have gone with them, but for Emilio. What a contrast he is to them. No wonder people congratulated them, as they might congratulate a toad on its jewel. It must be irksome for him to propel such people about. I hope he distinguishes between us; I hope he knows I only go in their gondola on his account. Do I really want him to know that? Perhaps not; but if you like anyone you can’t rest till they know you like them. I didn’t realize I liked him until Mrs. Kolynopulo said everyone did; then I saw that they must, and the thought gave me great pleasure. I believe I could stay in Venice for ever. Certainly when the Ks. depart (which is in five days now) I shall engage him. And so to bed, “pillowed on a pleasure”, to quote F. W. H. Myers.

  ‘Monday.—I am a little uneasy about Mamma. If I hadn’t gone to Torcello (and it takes the best part of the day by gondola) she would have stayed in. She didn’t want me to go, and perhaps I ought not to have gone; it is dull for her being alone; but she needn’t feel so strongly about the Kolynopulos: they are quite amusing in their way, and she might just as well have come with us. Now she has a temperature again, nothing much. I offered to sit up with her the first part of the night, but she wouldn’t hear of it. Too late for the Evanses and Stephen to call now; I am glad, rather, that they couldn’t get rooms at this hotel. Another scene with Mamma about Stephen. She thinks that if I don’t marry him I’ll never marry anyone; it is hard for us to make new friends, the choice is so small. The proximity of Amelia goads her into saying more than she means. I told her that Stephen meant nothing to me; since I had been at Venice he had ceased to exist for me. She asked why Venice had made any difference. I couldn’t tell her about Emilio, who is the real reason—not that I am in love with him—Heavens! but my thoughts turn on him in a special way; they run on oiled wheels, and if I try to think about Stephen at the same time the reverie breaks up, most painfully. I owe Stephen nothing. He lectures me and domineers over me and the sight of him recalls scenes of my childhood I would much rather forget. The fact that he has loved me for ten years only exasperates me; it is a thought outside my scheme, I don’t know how to deal with it. Sufficient unto the day: to-morrow will settle all. Pray heaven he may have fallen in love with Amelia.’